PDF will still occupy the high end. Most $1,000+ printers understand postscript and PDF natively, and even if these presses/printers are firmware upgradable, who wants another page description language? Especially if most of your graphics/pre-press people use Macs anyway and can't use Metro. Sorry, just because it's XML and doesn't have %% signs everywhere doesn't make it a worthwhile page description language.
I guess the target will be the low-end printers, those GDI-based ones that only work with proprietary undocumented drivers, and leave people with useless hardware when they upgrade Windows, let alone use another platform. If that's the case, all well and good. An open PDL will make these much more flexible.
Microsoft tried to butt in on Adobe's turf before with Truetype
Actually, that was started by Apple (it was called "Royal" originally). Adobe were being greedy about licensing ATM technology, so Apple and later MS decided to roll their own scaleable fonts. These days the coming font format is OpenType, which is an extension of Truetype which can use either Type 1 or Truetype glyphs. Only Adobe is really pushing that at the moment.
This is a lot of why companies (my employer included) are scared of open source.. What if your company invests time and money deploying app XYZ in their enterprise, and the lead developer either takes off or has a tiff with other devs on the project? Then the company either is up a creek with no paddle, or has to hire developers to take over dev on a project they know little about.
Exactly the same can happen with closed source, except then you don't even have the option of paying someone to keep working on it. Or, consider when MS or Adobe buy a company to get some key technology, or just to remove competition, chances are several product lines are going to be EOLd. How long can Macromedia Freehand last in the same company as Adobe Illustrator? The whole point of Open Source is that software can live forever if anyone wants to use it.
A quick google search reveals this message board, which is just speculation.
Yes, just wishful thinking, based on "Chewbacca"s contract having an option to do another three movies. That's just normal covering their bases so they can use him should it happen. When they cast a TV series they usually have all the actors sign 5-year contracts. That's no guarantee the pilot will air, let alone run for 5 years.
Maybe not for you, but you're forgetting that many household have more than 2 televisions (we have 6). At $70 each, that's $420.
I assume you would be able to feed several TVs from one converter box via a normal analog co-ax. Though perhaps only one channel at a time -- if you wanted to use them on differtn channels at the sme time probably a multiple-channel-out box would cost more, but not 100% more, I'd think.
Well, the government had either lift the regulation or start subsidizing these sets somehow. Oh wait, that comes out of our taxpayer money
In TFA it's said one reason there is a push to turn off analog broadcasting on schedule is that it will open up the frequencies for other uses. The FCC would auction these off for billions. Elsewhere it states the converter box would cost about $50-100. Spend a small part of the profit from selling the frequencies to subsidise converters for the poor. Same as compensatng people living on land taken over by the governemtn for some project. Still a net profit for everyone.
The idea is that you can remember the phrase and a particular method of generating the password.
Several people have suggested using the first line of a song, or its initials. I think that would add no more than a few thousand (considering Top 40 songs since 1940, say) to the dictionary attack, so once it's lost its "obscurity" security, that's not a great idea. Same for using famous quotes; just add the "fortune" file and you've got most of them.
I recall someone lamenting how their account had been broken into, despite using the highly secure password of "THX-1138", because hardly anyone had seen that George Lucas film.... What geeks think is obscure is probably the first thing tried (Klingon, Elvish, etc).
It will if they have to enter them into an online form at a few seconds each try. What system is so insecure that it lets you run billions of login attempts? I know there are hash files, but these aren't freely available these days for obvious reasons. Someone with access to that probably can get all my dat without a psswprd anyway. Also, they have to know the algorithm I've used to know which 10 billion passwords. In any case all my "top secret" files are offline. I don't do more than a very few credit card transactions online, which only require the numbers on the card anyway.
In HK if we want pirated DVDs or software, we can buy it for about 50c/disk. Less hassle than downloading mostly. Though I suppose BitTorrent will pick up when people want to see the new episodes of Survivor or whatever. (Even though the overseas bandwidth is capped, local P2P will go much faster once there's a local seed or two.)
But the commercial motivation is probably video on demand, and video phones.
Off topic -- but what about the heavy newspaper censorship imposed by China in HK then?
There isn't any "imposed", but much of the media is owned by moguls who suck up to Beijing to further their business interests. But notably critical of China is Jimmy Lai's Next and Apple Daily, (along with showbiz gossip). In HK we still have a local relay of the BBC World Service on AM radio, unchanged from before the handover.
I am assuming that Hong Kong is subject to the same 'Net censorship that the rest of mainland China is? Or is this true?
No we're not. I can download as much porn, and read as much American/Falun Gong/Tibetan propaganda as I like. They do censor nipples on TV, but I gather you get that too.
More and more people use txt spk and have various codes for words e.g. ROTFLMAO, so why not put some of these in passwords?
That only adds a few hundred words to teh tens of thousands in the standard password cracking dictionary, along with every Trek and Middle-earth related name. If you ONLY used l33t you'd be much les secure.
but brute forcing all combinations of 2 4-6 letter english words plus 2 digits is rediciously easy...
Easy, but still much better than the usual girl's name/birthday style. Consider there are at least 10.000 words in the average person's vocabulary. So two words gives you 100 million possible passwords, add two digits and you have 10 billion. Actually, this is the system I personally use, I feel comfortable with it. It's not invulnerable but safer than most.
. For people to switch, they'll need a good reason, a major thing that IE can't do. Right now there isn't one.
Yes there is, browse porn without having your system hosed with spyware, popups and malware. Free porn is used to recruit spam zombies and even nastier stuff. Porn forums will just laugh at people who complain about side effects while visiting porn sites with IE.
. Since this is about a story that was reposted just 36 hours after it was initally posted (which must be a world record)
Nothing like a record. I've often seen dupes both live on the front page, posted two or three hours apart. Not by the same editor, though Taco has reposted some "funny website" filler he'd already done months ago.
They just don't give a fuck. How hard is it to spellcheck -- they can't be bothered to do that; let alone check if a story is a dupe or a hoax or a year old.
I agree completely... and I also can't understand why we tip the servers at restaurants... I mean, if they don't do a good job shouldn't they just be fired?
That's the way it is in most places outside the US.
So that's why this is news over a year later. The TFA is dated "11 April 04". Slashdot: all the old news, dupes and hoaxes fit to print.
Anyway, it doesn't matter how the information was presented. Bush DOESN'T READ these reports. He has his staff read them to him and summarise; even the one page format, which seemed like a dumbing down when Reagan did it, is too much detail for him.
Well, you could stop being so damned afraid of your child and remove the stupid game without staging an elaborate lie to cover up
And especially since he'll then just ask you to reinstall it, or work out how to do it himself. I limit the time my daughter can watch cartoons, I don't pretend the TV is broken.
But this just seems to be asking for a lot of trouble. Humanitarily speaking, since they are not actually in any country, who protects the rights of those 600 laboring software engineers? Does anyone have the authority to make sure that it's not (child) slave labor? No government agency can make sure that working conditions are safe and healthy.
Whichever country the ship is registered in will have sovereignty. That's the reason so many ships are registered in such hubs of international commerce as Liberia or Panama, because they don't care how little you pay your crews, or how low your safety standards are. But in this case the employees will also have contracts with the compnay, and that will state how and where these are to be arbitrated. And as the whole point is to have your workers easily accessible to US management, and they'll have communications capabilities we can only dream of, any abuse of workers there would quickly be a scandal that couldn't be covered up, unlike the real sweatshops in Asia.
Only the teeniest, tiniest number of works has long term (i.e. over 1 year) substantial economic viability.
Authors that are in favor of long term copyrights because they think they'll actually make enough money from them to support their family during their life, and even after their death, are probably better off playing the lottery.
I get a lot of my reading from second hand books, partly because I'm a cheapskate. Often I come across books published 30 or 50 years ago that I've never heard of, that are emblazoned with "New York Times bestseller" or some such, and adulatory reviews. Often these are actually worth reading, and have an added piquancy due to their now period setting. If I do some research I can rarely find out anything online, meaning they've hardly been mentioned since the birth of the Net.
All this illustrates the above; that most books, even bestsellers, disappear from sight in a short time, and with extended copyrights, will certainly disappear forever once the author dies, or just drops out of sight -- no one will dare to republish it regardless of its interest for fear of the extreme penalties that would be incurred.
Name it "The Coffin." Most Frenchman or Americans can't escape from that.
Coffins have been used as a method of escape -- in Len Deighton's Funeral in Berlin notably. As this was usewd to penetrate the Berlin wall, the security analogy is even more acute. On the other hand, no one is known to have escaped form Alcatraz (several got away, but are believed to have drowned).
and they send you a.doc with the embedded image. Anyone who knows a better way than printing the.doc to Distiller with Print settings and opening that in Photoshop
If you have an embedded bitmap, save the doc to HTML and you'll get a HTML file and jpegs. In older versions of Word, 97 I think, this seemed to be at the original resolution. Later ones downsampled and made it fairly useless for print. If you don't have 97, or the file won;t open in it, for Word 2000 I found this method: this method that requiues some scripting:
Extracting Images from Microsoft Word Documents
by Ka-Ping Yee
You may have noticed while using Word that on many occasions, it loves to take control of your document away from you. It will rearrange your figures randomly, alter your formatting when you aren't looking, insert blank pages that hold the rest of your document hostage -- even fight with you over the text you are typing in. Just another way in which it loves to screw you over is to take ownership of any image you insert. The programmers responsible for image copy/paste and export deserve a good smack upside the head for this arrogance.
The Problem
Once you insert an image into a Word document, it's gone for good. Or so it seems. You can never recover the original image: as soon as the image arrives, it's automatically scaled to a different size. You'll find that if you try to copy the image and paste it outside of Word, it arrives scaled based on its size in the Word document. There's no way to fix it to 100% size again, so the image always comes out fuzzy. It also comes out horribly posterized for no particular reason; Word seems to apply a filter on export for the sole purpose of degrading your image.
But all of the image data is clearly present in the document. Word can scale it to any size. If you zoom in, all the detail is there. All of the colours appear crisp and perfect -- but in Word, and in Word only. How can you free your pixels from the tyranny?
The Secret
One of the many ways you can export your document, in Word 2000, is to "Compact HTML". This generates one HTML file with the text of your document and separate image files containing your figures. Alas, the images are JPEG files -- full of awful compression artifacts -- and of course they are randomly scaled to some size that depends on the size in your document and the phase of the moon.
However... if you watch very closely, you will see that PNG files exist in the output directory for just an instant before the JPEG files are written! The PNG files appear briefly, proving that Word has the pixels you want. Then, after it has mangled your artwork by converting it to JPEG, it blows away the PNG files (why would you want them anyway?).
The Solution
When you export your document to foo.html, the images appear in a directory called foo_files. Write a script to repeatedly copy away all the *.png files in this directory (your script will have to blindly copy away in an endless loop, not failing even while the directory doesn't exist). If you export to your home directory, which is cross-mounted from Unix to the Windows network on \\coeus, you can write this as a Unix shell script. For example:
mkdir saved while true; do /bin/cp -f ~/document_files/*.png saved done
Start running the script, and let it spew error messages.
Then do File -> Export To... -> Compact HTML, and save to \\coeus\userid\document.htm .
After the dust settles, you should find your images lying in the saved directory, with names like img00001.png, pristine and perfect as when they were first inserted -- rescued at last from Word's evil, megalomanaical clutches.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess the target will be the low-end printers, those GDI-based ones that only work with proprietary undocumented drivers, and leave people with useless hardware when they upgrade Windows, let alone use another platform. If that's the case, all well and good. An open PDL will make these much more flexible.
Microsoft tried to butt in on Adobe's turf before with Truetype
Actually, that was started by Apple (it was called "Royal" originally). Adobe were being greedy about licensing ATM technology, so Apple and later MS decided to roll their own scaleable fonts. These days the coming font format is OpenType, which is an extension of Truetype which can use either Type 1 or Truetype glyphs. Only Adobe is really pushing that at the moment.
Exactly the same can happen with closed source, except then you don't even have the option of paying someone to keep working on it. Or, consider when MS or Adobe buy a company to get some key technology, or just to remove competition, chances are several product lines are going to be EOLd. How long can Macromedia Freehand last in the same company as Adobe Illustrator? The whole point of Open Source is that software can live forever if anyone wants to use it.
Da Vinci dies almost 500 years ago. He still has rights? I thought the US had the record for incredibly long rights periods.
Perhaps try a more recent, even living, artist as an example. Eg, David Hockney.
Yes, just wishful thinking, based on "Chewbacca"s contract having an option to do another three movies. That's just normal covering their bases so they can use him should it happen. When they cast a TV series they usually have all the actors sign 5-year contracts. That's no guarantee the pilot will air, let alone run for 5 years.
I assume you would be able to feed several TVs from one converter box via a normal analog co-ax. Though perhaps only one channel at a time -- if you wanted to use them on differtn channels at the sme time probably a multiple-channel-out box would cost more, but not 100% more, I'd think.
In TFA it's said one reason there is a push to turn off analog broadcasting on schedule is that it will open up the frequencies for other uses. The FCC would auction these off for billions. Elsewhere it states the converter box would cost about $50-100. Spend a small part of the profit from selling the frequencies to subsidise converters for the poor. Same as compensatng people living on land taken over by the governemtn for some project. Still a net profit for everyone.
Several people have suggested using the first line of a song, or its initials. I think that would add no more than a few thousand (considering Top 40 songs since 1940, say) to the dictionary attack, so once it's lost its "obscurity" security, that's not a great idea. Same for using famous quotes; just add the "fortune" file and you've got most of them.
I recall someone lamenting how their account had been broken into, despite using the highly secure password of "THX-1138", because hardly anyone had seen that George Lucas film.... What geeks think is obscure is probably the first thing tried (Klingon, Elvish, etc).
It will if they have to enter them into an online form at a few seconds each try. What system is so insecure that it lets you run billions of login attempts? I know there are hash files, but these aren't freely available these days for obvious reasons. Someone with access to that probably can get all my dat without a psswprd anyway. Also, they have to know the algorithm I've used to know which 10 billion passwords. In any case all my "top secret" files are offline. I don't do more than a very few credit card transactions online, which only require the numbers on the card anyway.
But the commercial motivation is probably video on demand, and video phones.
There isn't any "imposed", but much of the media is owned by moguls who suck up to Beijing to further their business interests. But notably critical of China is Jimmy Lai's Next and Apple Daily, (along with showbiz gossip). In HK we still have a local relay of the BBC World Service on AM radio, unchanged from before the handover.
No we're not. I can download as much porn, and read as much American/Falun Gong/Tibetan propaganda as I like. They do censor nipples on TV, but I gather you get that too.
That only adds a few hundred words to teh tens of thousands in the standard password cracking dictionary, along with every Trek and Middle-earth related name. If you ONLY used l33t you'd be much les secure.
Ah yes, the Memento method.
Easy, but still much better than the usual girl's name/birthday style. Consider there are at least 10.000 words in the average person's vocabulary. So two words gives you 100 million possible passwords, add two digits and you have 10 billion. Actually, this is the system I personally use, I feel comfortable with it. It's not invulnerable but safer than most.
Yes there is, browse porn without having your system hosed with spyware, popups and malware. Free porn is used to recruit spam zombies and even nastier stuff. Porn forums will just laugh at people who complain about side effects while visiting porn sites with IE.
There is a better way: just look at the "older stuff" panel on the right.
There you find Older Articles and Yesterday's news. You can just edit the URL for any given day, the date format (issue=20050423) is obvious.
Nothing like a record. I've often seen dupes both live on the front page, posted two or three hours apart. Not by the same editor, though Taco has reposted some "funny website" filler he'd already done months ago.
They just don't give a fuck. How hard is it to spellcheck -- they can't be bothered to do that; let alone check if a story is a dupe or a hoax or a year old.
That's the way it is in most places outside the US.
So that's why this is news over a year later. The TFA is dated "11 April 04". Slashdot: all the old news, dupes and hoaxes fit to print.
Anyway, it doesn't matter how the information was presented. Bush DOESN'T READ these reports. He has his staff read them to him and summarise; even the one page format, which seemed like a dumbing down when Reagan did it, is too much detail for him.
And especially since he'll then just ask you to reinstall it, or work out how to do it himself. I limit the time my daughter can watch cartoons, I don't pretend the TV is broken.
Whichever country the ship is registered in will have sovereignty. That's the reason so many ships are registered in such hubs of international commerce as Liberia or Panama, because they don't care how little you pay your crews, or how low your safety standards are. But in this case the employees will also have contracts with the compnay, and that will state how and where these are to be arbitrated. And as the whole point is to have your workers easily accessible to US management, and they'll have communications capabilities we can only dream of, any abuse of workers there would quickly be a scandal that couldn't be covered up, unlike the real sweatshops in Asia.
I get a lot of my reading from second hand books, partly because I'm a cheapskate. Often I come across books published 30 or 50 years ago that I've never heard of, that are emblazoned with "New York Times bestseller" or some such, and adulatory reviews. Often these are actually worth reading, and have an added piquancy due to their now period setting. If I do some research I can rarely find out anything online, meaning they've hardly been mentioned since the birth of the Net.
All this illustrates the above; that most books, even bestsellers, disappear from sight in a short time, and with extended copyrights, will certainly disappear forever once the author dies, or just drops out of sight -- no one will dare to republish it regardless of its interest for fear of the extreme penalties that would be incurred.
Coffins have been used as a method of escape -- in Len Deighton's Funeral in Berlin notably. As this was usewd to penetrate the Berlin wall, the security analogy is even more acute. On the other hand, no one is known to have escaped form Alcatraz (several got away, but are believed to have drowned).
If you have an embedded bitmap, save the doc to HTML and you'll get a HTML file and jpegs. In older versions of Word, 97 I think, this seemed to be at the original resolution. Later ones downsampled and made it fairly useless for print. If you don't have 97, or the file won;t open in it, for Word 2000 I found this method: this method that requiues some scripting: